Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Question Mark Cane

I recently started using StubleUpon. I confined my searches to the Logic category and ended up finding a riddle website. I was solving riddles for hours yesterday. Here are three of my favorites:

Riddle 1: You are on an island surrounded by natives and visitors. The natives always lie. The visitors always tell the truth. All natives and visitors answer yes and no questions with the words "da" and "ba" but you don't know which means yes and which means no. You wish to know the true answer to a yes/no question (for simplicity: let's say the question is: Is today Wednesday?) but you may only ask one person one question. How do you do it?

Riddle 2: You walk into a room with 3 primates in it. There's a chimpanzee holding two bananas, an orangutan holding a stick, and a gorilla holding nothing. Which is the smartest primate in the room?

Riddle 3: All violins in a certain city were produced by Esau or one of his sons, or by Jacob or one of his sons. The violins are labeled to reveal the identity of their maker. Esau and his sons always label their violins truthfully; Jacob and his sons always label their violins with falsehoods. As an example, collectors figured out that a violin labeled "This violin was not made by any son of Esau." was made by Esau Sr. The most desirable violins are so labeled that a connoisseur can tell that it must have been made by one of the fathers, either Esau Sr. or Jacob Sr., but cannot tell which. How might such a violin be labeled?

Answer 1: You ask this: "If I were to ask you 'Is today Wednesday?', would you say ba?" If the person responds ba, it is Wednesday. If they respond da, it is not Wednesday. Interestingly, you can obtain the truth without knowing whether you are speaking to a native or visitor and without knowing what ba and da mean.

Answer 2: You are. Hopefully.

Answer 3: There are multiple solutions. One is: This violin was made by Esau Sr or by one of Jacob's sons.

Monday, November 21, 2011

Bridge Club Soda Cracker Barrel of Monkeys

Orlando is a space-time anomaly. One can easily drive into the city in no time at all, but it always takes about five times as long to get out. It's like a black hole right in the middle of central Florida.

My facial hair disgusts me. It grows just fast enough to be a nuisance but no faster. I'd like to try wearing a goatee, but I'd have to look like an idiot for about 8 years while I was busy growing it.

Christmas music is a sacred holiday tradition, and I can't understand why anyone would want to violate that tradition by listening to it on any day before Thanksgiving. You wouldn't eat hot dogs and blow up your neighborhood a month before July 4th, would you? And you wouldn't eat Peeps on a day besides Easter, would you? I thought not. So shape up and shut off the Jingle Bells for at least 4 more days. Please.

I want to become really good at a game. I don't care whether it's bridge, chess, spades, or Brockian Untra-Cricket. I just want to become good enough to play socially in a club or something. I think it'd be fun.

I'll never love Dennis Haysbert again.

Friday, November 18, 2011

Ecclesiastes, Extra Credit, Engagement

I recently finished listening to The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. It was a curious book. My favorite thing about it was that it was read by William Hurt, who has an awesome voice and can do all the accents beautifully.
SPOILER ALERT
Literally the only thing that happened was a lot of eating in cafes and drinking in bars and watching bullfights. The starring female had two affairs. The starring male and female never ended up together. They only hypothesized that they would have been happy together, if they had ever really been together. Quite an uneventful book. But well written and well read.
END SPOILING

I attended a lecture for extra credit in my economics course. The speaker was Famous Dave, an American Indian who openly admitted to having had problems with alcohol abuse. I read a book by the light of my phone the whole time. I never knew that 'Entrepreneurial Lecture' translated to 'Self-Help Seminar'. It lasted a little over an hour and when it ended, I realized that I could have easily walked into the lobby after the talk and recieved an attendance card without ever having to actually go into the auditorium. It was depressing.

3 weeks and 1 day until the wedding. The marriage counseling is over, but I still have some vital information to glean. I plan on watching Inception, The O Network, and Twilight for the rest of my marriage advice. I hope you've detected the sarcasm I just employed. Because I was employing it.

I am of facets.

Monday, November 14, 2011

For The Win?

I played the battle of the sexes on MIX 1051 again this morning. I won again.

I got a $50 gift card to Subway, but I'm not sure I want to trek to the other side of Orlando to pick it up from the station. I also won tickets to Festival of Trees. Slightly less epic than Wicked.

I've listened to the morning show for some time now, and I enjoy it. Having contributed 2 wins to the guy's side of BOTS, I feel like a (very small) part of the station.

I never saw a picture of the show's hosters (Scott, Jay, and Dana) until this morning. I didn't realize that I had a mental picture of how I thought they looked until I saw them and realized how wrong I was.

In other news:
Last Man Standing is hilarious. It may just beat Home Improvement.
I love when daylight savings time ends. The light is just perfect.
I now have 5 followers. One for each of the basic elements of nature: Earth, Wind, Fire, Water, and Plastic. I'll leave it to you to decide who's who.

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Shared Experience Simulator

Here's an idea: Shared Experience Simulators

What if we could get an electronic hookup to the part of a person's brain that receives impulses from our five (or more) senses. We could record those impulses and play them back for others to experience.

If I turn on my SES recorder for an hour at the beach, then I can later distribute that recording to others. They can play it back and experience every feeling, sight, smell, taste, hearing, and touch, that I felt during that hour. It'd be a first person experience in which the person does (in their mind) exactly everything that I did in that hour except for knowing my thoughts (since they're not part of the sensory impulses). They wouldn't be able to change any of my actions or interact with their environment in any way different from the way that I did it originally.

If this idea could be created, the implications are endless.

Implication 1: Blind people could see. People in comas could experience some form of life again. People in wheelchairs could feel the sensation of walking (which might help their own recovery). Old people could do things their body couldn't handle. Nervous people could try a dangerous sport or activity without the risk.

Implication 2: Students could go through a day in the life (or an hour or whatever) of a person in a certain career as an epic form of job shadowing.

Implication 3: Imsomniacs could playback recordings of other people asleep and still get the sensation of sleeping and be rested.

Implication 4: The military could torture people by making them experience an SES playback. This would involve pain, but wouldn't hurt the victim's physical body in any way.

Implication 5: You could stream your SES recording live to the internet and let people download it from your site.

Implication 6: Celebrities and movie stars could make MASSIVE amounts of money by selling 1-time-use SES recordings from when they're doing a concert or making a movie.

Implication 7: Inception style recording within a recording within a recording. To prevent this, the SES could be designed so that it can't record and play at the same time.

Implication 8: The implications are endless.

Let me know some of your ideas based on the idea of a Shared Experience Simulator.
The comment box is just below.